


All In Your Head

by sparxwrites



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Anxiety, Descent into Madness, Drinking & Talking, Gen, Illnesses, Paranoia, Tails
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 23:39:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3187562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oh, hey, Kirin!” says Garion, cheerfully, pulling his hand away from the sword and raising it in greeting. “How’re you doing? Come for more mead?” He grins – only for the expression to slip a bit when he notices exactly how off Kirin looks. He seems paler than usual, drawn, and the way he closes the door behind him is oddly deliberate.</p>
<p>The low, flickering light of the torches makes it a little hard to tell, but Garion thinks Kirin’s hands might be shaking as they carefully push the door shut.</p>
<p>(In which Kirin has problems, and Garion doesn't really have any solutions.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	All In Your Head

**Author's Note:**

> a little something based on ep. 22 of rr:ef, and on ftb’s wiki entry for “warp”. many thanks to sassytail for letting me play puppet master with his character, and answering my endless questions. i am a very nosy author.
> 
> **warnings** for anxiety, hallucinations, paranoia, and a host of other unpleasant psychological stuff. also spiders, and mentions of cannibalism/gross eating stuff.

Garion looks up as the door to the bar creaks open, one hand reaching ever so casually for the sword  tucked against the underside of the bar. “Hello?” he calls, the stillness broken only by the  _drip drip drip_  of the last of the water draining from the sink he’d been washing the dirty tankards in.

It’s probably a very late customer – someone bored, or caught out late on an exploratory trip and needing to stay the night, but still. Better safe than sorry.

A moment later, a familiar shade of hair pokes its way round the door, swiftly followed by a familiar face, and he relaxes. “Oh, hey, Kirin!” he says, cheerfully, pulling his hand away from the sword and raising it in greeting. “How’re you doing? Come for more mead?”

He grins – only for the expression to slip a bit when he notices exactly how  _off_  Kirin looks. There are no visible injuries, no blood or bruises, but there’s definitely something wrong. He seems paler than usual, drawn, and the way he closes the door behind him is oddly deliberate.

The low, flickering light of the torches makes it a little hard to tell, but Garion thinks Kirin’s hands might be shaking as they carefully push the door shut.

Heart sinking a little, he makes sure not to let the concern show on his face. “Bit late to be wandering around, isn’t it?” he asks, as casually as he can manage, a worried by the fact Kirin still hasn’t said anything.

“...There are spiders all over my base,” says Kirin, all at once, the words falling out in an alarmed and faintly bewildered jumble.

For a long moment, Garion just  _stares_. “I think you’d better sit down and have a drink and explain,” he says, when he finally manages to process exactly what he’s just heard, words slow and measured. He gestures to a stool at the bar, and carefully doesn’t ask why Kirin is in such a state over spiders. “On the house.”

Walking over and perching on the bar stool with a slightly dazed expression, Kirin curls his tail around the leg of it and rests elbows on the bar, massaging his temples. “Spiders,” he repeats, somewhere between incredulous and horrified and exhausted, as if Garion had never spoken. “Just- they came out of  _nowhere_. Tiny little translucent-” He shudders, eyes squeezing shut. “Sort of purplish, the size of my head. There were  _hundreds_ of them.”

“Some kind of infestation?” asks Garion, hesitantly, as he fishes a tankard out of a pile of them next to the sink, locating the mead barrel as he does so. “There might be a nest in that roof space you have. It’s warm, dry…”

He knows it’s not an infestation – not a natural one, anyway. No spiders he’s ever seen have been translucent, let alone tiny. Spiders are huge, hip-height monstrosities that can jump higher than a human is tall, and are definitely not translucent and faintly purple. He doesn’t say any of that, though.

Kirin shakes his head, gratefully taking the mug of mead offered to him, curling hands around the metal tankard but not drinking. “No, they- they  _literally_  came out of nowhere.” He grimaces, takes a mouthful of mead to try and wash off the feeling of the dozens of legs on his skin from the ones that had actually spawned on him. “It was some kind of magic, I’m sure of it.”

Humming sympathetically, Garion shrugs. He steps out from behind the bar to start tipping chairs upside down and setting them on the tables, the tops of which were wiped down hours ago when the last customer left.  “There’s a lot of weird magic here,” he says, a slightly sour note to his voice – he’s been caught on the wrong end of the various unnatural perils this land holds one time too often to be overly fond of them.[1]  “If they’re still there when you get back, you should probably just get someone to help you kill them all, and hope it was some freak accident.”

“Lying?” suggests Kirin, a crooked smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.

Garion laughs, a quiet bark of sound that echoes a little in the mostly empty room. “No,  _definitely_  not Lying,” he says, shaking his head. “Find one of the others, someone who won’t hate you forever just for suggesting it.” He looks up from finishing the second table to see Kirin staring at him, one eyebrow raised, and groans. “Oh, come on.”

Pressing a hand to his heart, Kirin does his best attempt at a kicked puppy impression, slightly ruined by the amusement still clear in his eyes. “You wouldn’t help a friend?” he asks, voice mock-wounded. “You’d leave me to suffer alone? With a house infested with tiny, translucent spiders?”

“…Fine, fine,” groans Garion reluctantly, biting down on his lip to try and keep from smiling. It doesn’t work. “I’ve I’ve got a sword, I’ve  _probably_  got armour somewhere…” He sighs dramatically. “If I die, it’s on your head, you know.”

Kirin just shrugs, sipping at his mead. “I think I’ll manage to live with the crippling guilt, somehow.”

Setting the last chair atop the last table, Garion slides back behind the bar, pulling a damp washcloth from where it’s hung over a tap and beginning to wipe the lacquered bar top down with it. For a long minute, there’s a companionable silence, broken only by the sound of Kirin taking another drink

“...So,” says Garion eventually, the question he’s been dying to ask since Kirin first walked in finally escaping him. “What’s got you so upset? And don’t say spiders – Lying was in here a few days after you two took on the wither a while back, and they were  _laughing_  about it. I’m guessing a couple of spiders aren’t more than a bother to you guys.”

Kirin’s expression slips, some of the light and life draining from his eyes before he wrestles his face back into something approaching neutrality. Even that, though, can’t hide how tired he suddenly looks. Rubbing a distracted thumb over the rib of the tankard and staring down at the top of the bar, he sighs.

Garion almost regrets asking.

“I’m- something’s not right, Garion,” says Kirin, and his smile’s stretched thin and almost scared at the edges. “I hear voices, these- these  _things_  keep appearing in my base. Not the spiders, other things. These- these  _figures_. My vision keeps blurring, doing weird things – some nights, I can suddenly see in the dark, and sometimes-” He swallows, clutches at the tankard in his grip, dragging blunt nails across the battered metal of it. “Sometimes I can’t see, even in daylight.”

Missing the concern that flickers over Garion’s face, he takes a gulp of mead to try and steady the coiling of his stomach and regrets it when it only makes it turn more. “Then there’s that- the Hunger,” he continues, feels even more nauseous at the mere memory. “It-”

The desperation, the craving for raw, red meat, how appealing even the rotting flesh he’d found at the back of a cupboard has seemed. The way it’d felt as the chunks had slid down his throat and into the ball of spiking pain his stomach had become, the relief, the  _pleasure_ -  


He cuts that train of thought off before it can go further, squeezing his tankard until the rough seams cut into his palms in an attempt to draw his mind back to the present.

“There was something  _following_  me the whole way here,” he says, because that seems safer than talking about the Hunger – prickling anxiety and paranoia easier than confronting the dark ball of twistedness lodged somewhere below his ribs. He glances over his shoulder, out the dark windows of the tavern, shuddering a little at the way the night seems to press hungrily against the glass. “I don’t know what, but it was there, I’m _sure_  of it. There were these- these  _noises_ -”

This time he catches the worried look in Garion’s eyes before the other man can hide it, reflected in the mirrored surface of the windows, and frowns. “You think I’m making this up. You- you think I’m going mad, don’t you?” he says – before sighing, scrubbing palms over his face and pressing the heels of them into his eye sockets when Garrion stays carefully silent.

“... _I_ think I might be going mad,” he adds quietly, when Garion doesn’t answer.

There’s another long pause, where Garion sets his cloth down on the bar top and smooths hands down the front of his waistcoat, buying himself thinking time. “Maybe- maybe you should stay here for the night,” he says, quietly, deliberately answering neither the question nor Kirin’s own answer to it. “There’s a spare room upstairs. You’re welcome to use it as long as you don’t wake the other guest.”

Shaking his head, Kirin sets the half-full tankard down on the now-clean bar top, wincing a little at the circle it makes on the shining surface. “No, no,” he says, setting a coin down next to the alcohol, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t want to be a bother, really, I-”

“Kirin.” Garion sighs, pushing the coin back across the bar towards him. “Keep the money – on the house, remember? It’s not a bother. There’s a room upstairs, bed made. It’ll be safer than walking home in the dark, especially with the… with things being the way they are.”

He skirts around what he actually wants to say – carefully doesn’t mention that wandering around at night is dangerous enough even for people who aren’t hearing voices and losing their vision at random – but Kirin winces all the same, rubbing a hand over his mouth.

“If you’re sure?” he says slowly, a grateful edge to his voice. “I mean, it  _is_  a bit of a walk home-”

“Up the stairs, second doorway on the right. Careful of the second stair from the top, it creaks. Really should fix that, actually.” Garion gestures absently in the direction of the stairs, picking up the washcloth again and starting on the last section of the bar. “Go on. Shoo.”  


There’s a moment’s pause where Kirin doesn’t move – other than his tail, which uncurls from around the stool to flick from side to side. Then he stands up, picking the returned coin up and slipping it into his pocket with a small smile. “Thanks, Garion,” he says, quietly.

“Shoo,” repeats Garion, flicking the washcloth in the direction of the stairs without looking up, smiling down at the bar surface. “You can repay my hospitality by not climbing out the roof this time.”


End file.
